I build products that hold up when real people use them, and I co-founded and help run an assistive technology company. So accessibility isn't an audit item bolted on at the end. It's a design constraint in everything here.

What I take on

Consulting and contract engineering, fractional and advisory work, and full-time roles. Remote. The shape matters less than the problem. Bring the problem.

• Accessibility done properly. WCAG 2.2 AA and Section 508 as engineering requirements, not a report at the end. That includes the awkward cases that only surface when a real user drives the thing, and conformance reports that only claim what was actually tested.
• Assistive and medical device software. Mobility, rehabilitation and adaptive input, plus the regulatory and grant-funded side.
• Desktop and systems work. Tauri and Rust, native application shells, real-time input and audio pipelines.
• Release engineering. Signed distributable binaries, firmware signing and attestation, release channels, and CI that actually gates.
• Advisory. Grant scoping and SBIR work, technical due diligence, and standing in as the engineering voice for a team that doesn't have one yet.

I've done this before. I consulted for Genentech from 2019 to 2022 on the rollout of Risdiplam, an SMA therapeutic, for Biogen in 2018, and advised Disability Rights Advocates from 2018 to 2021.

ATDev, ARPA-H and ATOS

Most of my time goes to ATDev. I co-founded Assistive Technology Development, Inc. in May 2020, and I'm also CMO. ATDev co-leads RAMMP, a five-year $41M ARPA-H program led by the University of Pittsburgh. My part is ATOS, the open platform layer: wheelchair and mobility middleware on ESP-IDF, with a NASA Open MCT ground station and a console that signs module and firmware images and promotes them onto release channels. 38 of its 44 commits are mine, including the CI and release pipeline that publishes signed binaries. Not a slide. A repo.

ATDev also ships Reflex, an FDA-registered telehealth-enabled robotic knee brace in limited release across eight states, and holds an NIH / ACL NIDILRR SBIR Phase I award. The assistive technology page has the full story, including OPAL and the Unreal Editor work.

Selected work

Defensible, accessibility audits that won't overclaim

A scanner can settle about a fifth of WCAG 2.2 AA. Most conformance reports claim the rest anyway. Defensible is the audit harness I built that won't: five checks (axe, IBM Equal Access, a keyboard probe, a state fuzzer and a PDF, DOCX and PPTX checker), every finding mapped to the criterion it fails, and four rules about what may be claimed that can't be switched off. Whatever it can't reach reads Not Evaluated, with the reason.

It produces a VPAT 2.5 conformance report with OpenACR YAML for procurement, a remediation summary built for an AI coding agent to work from, and a diff between runs that exits nonzero on any regression, so CI can gate on it. The first report is the easy part. Keeping it true is the product. It isn't public yet.

MacroVox, a real-time voice product

A voice product is a latency chain: audio capture, streaming transcription over a WebSocket, language-model cleanup, then text delivered into whatever application has focus. MacroVox ships all of it as one product. 32 backend command entry points stay in lockstep with a typed TypeScript bridge, and tsc --noEmit gates CI so the client and the service can't drift apart. Supabase and Stripe sit behind a proxy that verifies a JWT, gates on subscription status and allowlists models. Provider credentials never ship inside the client.

The performance work is the part I'd point at. Replacing a ~700 ms paste path with native key injection cut it to a 50 ms focus-settle delay. Migrating off Electron took the installer from ~150 MB to ~5 MB and idle memory from 150 to 300 MB down to ~30 MB, with the React renderer intact and only the layer underneath rewritten. Same product, a fraction of the weight.

Folio, an open-source PDF viewer

Forms, annotations and signing are where a PDF viewer usually stops being usable without a mouse. Folio is React 19 and TypeScript in a Rust and Tauri 2 shell, rendering with PDF.js, with annotations that embed into a saved copy, OCR, cryptographic signing and a plugin system. Every placed object is fully keyboard operable, over a real selectable text layer, with ARIA landmarks and live-region announcements, targeting WCAG 2.2 AA and Section 508.

markcopy, a VS Code extension

Paste formatted text into Gmail or Outlook and it can arrive stripped. This one is on the VS Code Marketplace and Open VSX, installed by people who aren't me. It writes both text/html and text/plain to the clipboard with styles inlined, because Gmail and Outlook strip <style> blocks and the paste arrives unformatted otherwise. Real users hit that, so it's in there.

Code I didn't write, changed and merged

Getting a change past reviewers who didn't have to accept it is a different skill from writing your own project. Two contributions merged into Mathlib 4, the Lean 4 mathematics library, after 8 and 14 review comments. Then 34 pull requests to Dasher, 29 of them merged. And a whole new module in Microsoft's PowerToys, Mouse Button Lock, merged in October 2026 after 11 reviews. The record is public.

Experience

Co-founder and CMO, Assistive Technology Development, Inc. (May 2020 to present)

ATOS, RAMMP and Reflex, above. Along the way: Berkeley SkyDeck Entrepreneur in Residence (2022), UCSF Rosenman Innovator (2022), MassRobotics and Innosphere Ventures EIR (2021 to 2022), and NSF I-Corps Entrepreneurial Lead (2020 to 2021).

Scientific Researcher, National Institutes of Health (September 2021 to May 2022)

ACL NIDILRR SBIR Phase I recipient, for the Rehab Robo award.

Accessibility Researcher, Google (August 2021 to April 2022)

Research with Google's Central Accessibility team.

Executive Director, Center for Independent Living, Berkeley (August 2023 to May 2024)

Board of Directors from January 2018, on the finance subcommittee. Led 35+ staff at a founding organization of the independent living movement, owning strategy, finances, programs and partnerships.

Chairman, Public Authority for In-Home Supportive Services, Alameda County (January 2015 to August 2018)

A sworn-in county position, advising and advocating on matters affecting disabled and elderly people.

Consultant, Genentech (July 2019 to April 2022)

The Risdiplam rollout. Earlier: Biogen (2018), and Disability Rights Advocates as advisor (2018 to 2021).

Education

University of California, Berkeley. B.A. Film and Media, 2017. Mathematics coursework, 2009 to 2012.

Stack

• Languages. TypeScript and JavaScript, Python, Rust, C++, Kotlin, SQL, Bash.
• Front end. React 18 and 19, Vite, Tailwind, PDF.js, esbuild, typed client boundaries, WCAG 2.2 AA and Section 508, ARIA and live regions.
• Back end and systems. REST and WebSocket protocol design, IPC and API surface design, Supabase, Netlify Functions, Stripe, concurrent Rust with tokio, ESP-IDF.
• Testing and delivery. Playwright, Vitest, GitHub Actions, tsc --noEmit, clippy -D warnings, Semgrep, gitleaks, Ed25519 release attestation, code signing.
• Also. Multi-model orchestration under a latency budget, prompt-injection mitigation, Certified Penetration Tester.

Get in touch

Tell me the problem and what shape of help you're after. A short engagement is fine, so is a long one, so is a conversation about something full-time.

owenpkent@gmail.com  ·  LinkedIn  ·  GitHub